Only Holocaust survivors know what it was like to have
been dehumanized, stripped of rights, family, and possessions. As the
number of living survivors gradually dwindles, it is essential to record
their experiences in order to gain insight into this tragedy. Today many
Holocaust survivors are willing to share their biographies, to explain
the horrific incident, the "Night," that forever altered their
lives. Imparting their memories to others gives purpose to their
sufferings, for by doing so they help to ensure that future generations
will never experience a similar fate.

The Nazis needed the complicity of society in order to purge the
Jews, as well as millions of other minorities, from the face of Europe.
A Holocaust survivor summarizes: "It is easier to kill a nothing
than a somebody." This statement epitomizes the mentality that
facilitated and allowed the deaths of millions of victims of Hitler's
terrorist regime. The Nazis had to mask their atrocities, and conceal
their agenda cleverly with the use of semantics. Through the use of
verbal dehumanization, they conditioned society to accept the Holocaust
"Jews" became "the Plague" and "Germany's
Misfortune"; "Pure" Germans became the "Superior
Race"; murder became "racial cleansing." Simultaneously,
the Nazis utilized every means of governmental authority to achieve the
Final Solution. Nazi fanatics authored the anti-Semitic laws that
dominated the political scene in Germany from 1933-1939. The culmination
of this legislation rendered the Jews powerless, unable to receive an
education, own property, hold a job, or vote. In a mere six years, the
societal perception of Jews leapt from those who hadnothing
to those who were nothing.

Few survived the Holocaust; none came away unscathed. They carry a
tragic memory that will accompany them throughout their lives.
Emotionally, some survivors find it almost impossible to recount their
experiences. Those survivors who dare to explain the memory are forced
to reflect on the most horrible period in their lives. However, they are
willing to make that sacrifice. At 74 years old, Garmaine Pitchon is
such a survivor. She is a human who experienced dehumanization; a person
once considered "a nothing."

Upon entering Mrs. Pitchon's home, one is struck by the hundreds of
family photos adorning the walls. Neatly stored in a cabinet are
numerous family albums, which she is ever-willing to share and display.
Indeed, Mrs. Pitchon's life revolves around her family. They are
precious to her because, had not a miracle occurred more than fifty
years ago, they would not be alive today.

Garmaine was born in Salonika, Greece, into a loving Jewish family
and closelyknit community. She first experienced Nazism when her family
was loaded onto cattle cars in 1943 with the "promise" of a
new residence in an agricultural area. She was sixteen at the time,
uprooted from her hometown and transported to the most infamous of all
Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz. As was the routine, she was
separated from her family, stripped, shaved, and given a man's pajama.
Garmaine was sent to the notorious Block Ten, where "sinister
gynecological experiments" were performed on young women.
Typically, the women were led to a downstairs "laboratory,"
strapped to a table, and injected with formaldehyde. Often, the Nazis
injected this poison into the woman's ovaries and womb, to test the
woman's ability to endure different methods of sterilization. However,
in Garmaine's case, the Nazis planned to sterilize all the women of
Block Ten by surgically removing their reproductive organs without the
use of anesthesia. Of the three hundred girls in her group chosen for
"experimentation," she was the first to undergo the diabolical
butchery. Some died immediately following the excruciating operation.
The doctor who was forced to perform the operations was a fellow
prisoner, who showed compassion to Garmaine, and devised a plan to save
her. She recalls his whisper: "I am going to cut you open, but I
will not take anything out. If they [the Nazis]find out, they will kill
me." The doctor fulfilled his promise, and was later hanged for
aiding similar victims. Because of his heroic assistance, Garmaine is
one of two of the three hundred Block Ten inmates to ever have children.

Garmaine's miraculous escape from "surgery" was only the
beginning of her concentration-camp existence. Prompted to recall the
overall atmosphere of the camp, she explains: "In everything we
were forced to do, they tried to make us feel like animals." They
were forced to labor for hours on end, working at the most menial and
degrading tasks. Garmaine was given no extra blankets for winter, no
extra water for summer, and was rarely fed. Garmaine states
emphatically: "Why should they feed us? They wanted us todie."
To the Nazis, lives were expendable, for they could readily be replaced
by other "specimens." Garmaine and her fellow victims had to
live with the constant knowledge that, through arbitrary selection, the
Nazi "doctors" could kill them by "medical" torture
or by the gas chambers.

Some survivors determined to defy the dehumanization tactics that
assailed them on all sides. Garmaine is one of them. After the Nazis had
stripped her of everything that belonged to her-her family, friends,
property, and even identity-she endured. Her philosophy was one of hope:
"You could not live everyday being afraid to die. You had to
resolve to live. You had to have courage, and faith."

At one time during her imprisonment at Auschwitz, she was visibly
rewarded for this optimistic faith. Trapped in a room with fellow
inmates, she had not eaten for days; "I was almost dead."
Defying all rules, she reached up to a window, broke it, and screamed
for help. "Then, a loaf of bread dropped into my hands. I shared it
with the others." When asked who might have come to her aid, saving
her life, she states: "I always think it was God."

Garmaine survived the depravity of the Holocaust. She entered
Auschwitz as a young, happy sister and daughter; she left without family
and with the utmost personal knowledge of man's inhumanity to man. Like
other Holocaust survivors, she has used her experience to enrich
society. One is compelled to ask why, for this is the same society that
remained silent while anti-Semitism raged. It is the same
"civilized" society that accepted the dehumanization of the
Jews, and condoned Hitler's insane bigotry. Surely, Garmaine has just
grounds for resentment and bitterness. She, however, does not blame
society for her misfortunes. Neither does she blame any religion,
stating that Christians and Jehovah's Witnesses were also murdered in
the Holocaust. "I do not feel hate towards anyone. It was a small,
powerful group of people who were crazy with hate that caused the
Holocaust."

Then, why not just suppress the memory? Indeed, doing so for her own
comfort would be much more convenient than attempting to reform the
world. The answer lay in the common desire of all Holocaust survivors to
prevent others from experiencing a similar tragedy. It would be
irresponsible to remain silent. Her compulsion to speak echoes the
message of survivor Elie Wiesel: "I do not want my past to become
their future." Though the absolute horror of the Holocaust is
unprecedented, there exists no guarantee that it will not happen again.
Other minority groups are constantly in peril of systematic
dehumanization and death. As history has demonstrated, "From words
to deeds, the distance is not great."

What must we do, we, the new generation of the twenty-first century?
Though we have not witnessed the hateful and senseless murder of our
families, it is our responsibility to ensure that similar atrocities
never recur. To do this, we must be perceptive and sensitive to the
world around us, intolerant of bigotry and steadfast in our resolution
to fight prejudice. We must never fall to apathy, for, as Elie Wiesel
warns, "apathy only helps the victimizer." We are compelled to
remember the victims, lest we forget thelessons of their
sufferings. Empowered by their memory, we must exert an indefatigable
effort to counferact the mistakes of the past that are resurfacing in
our world today. Following the example of the survivors, we must imprint
the memory of the Holocaust on our souls, so that hate and prejudice may
never destroy another human life

Bibliogranhy

Bitton-Jackson, Livia. I Have Lived a Thousand Years.
New York: Simon &Schuster Publishing, 1997.